A mortal's blood leads us
by SarahBelle
Summary: With her uncle’s blood upon her head, the new director of Hellsing is now prey to an ancient justice, and must turn to her undead servant to find a way to avoid the madness and death promised to her by the Furies. Crossover with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
1. Chapter 1

**Important note: This story begins in 1987, due to Integral being twelve years old at the time. The Sandman comic series began in 1988, so the canon time periods overlap.**

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"My, my! She practically knits herself, this one does!" The blonde young woman – called Clotho, for now at least – leans forward to stare more closely at the threads of blue and brown and gold that twist and twine together in the older one's hands. "You _are_ making her something special, aren't you? I wondered that you hadn't used the gold in a long while." 

"I thought it would be nice, my dove. Isn't she going wonderfully?" The motherly figure – at the moment going by Lachesis – works quickly and speedily, feeding more into the shorter piece even as she brings a larger, non-descript piece of cloth to a close. "Such a strong and bold weave it is too; it'll wear well, no doubt."

"Not like this one." The oldest of the three, wrinkled and gnarled and warty – Atropos at present – opens and closes a pair of scissors closer to the thread, eager for the end. "I _t__ol__d_ you this one was a waste of yarn, from beginning to end. I could tell from the very weave you were using, but would you listen? Would you, my Aunt Banana!" She snips the thread, with an evident air of satisfaction, the blades snapping like the crack of a bullet fired from a gun. "And good riddance. Went on for far too long, he did."

The thread is cut, the cloth is finished. Lachesis folds it with one hand and lays it aside next to the tea tray, still intent upon the remaining piece.

"But then, in his weakness and flawed nature he's made this one all the stronger." Clotho regards the smaller cloth with a certain fondness. "I _like_ her. She isn't so meek and mild now, you can tell. She'll not break or tear so easily. And to have _that_ one serving her as well; she'll go far."

"So what? No doubt she'll make a mess of what she's been given sooner or later. They always do." Atropos lays down the scissors, her job done for now, and takes up the teapot instead. "Who wants what? We've got ginger snaps, fruit cake and a fortune cookie." Her eyes go to Lachesis, but the matron is still intent on her work, a small smile growing larger.

"I'll have the cookie, then." Clotho reaches out slender fingers tipped with black polished nails to pick up the item in question, breaking it open and reading out the fortune inside, as if she has done this many, many times before. _"Since a mother's blood leads us, we will pursue our case against this man and we will hunt him down.__" _She purses her lips in thought as she drops the fortune on the table._"_Did we ever say that, really?"

"Aeschylus needs will have it so, my lovely, and who are we to say any differently? It certainly sounds like us, in any case."

Atropos snorts as she pours the tea into three cups. "Keh. That squirt Orestes should never have got off. Couldn't even be prepared to take the consequences of knifing his own mother until there was no juice left in her, no, he had to go whining to that shiny owner of his that it wasn't _fair_." Her cracked voice takes on a mock whining tone, filled with disgust. "Not _fair. _What's fairness got to do with it? We were rightness and justice itself!"

"And so we will be again." Clotho takes her cup from the eldest, her pleasure gone now and her face creased with the knowledge of the past and present and what is to come. "We'll be called soon, won't we? It's been a long time since we took on this role. How long has it been? Tens of years? Hundreds? And _never_ to plague a child before."

"Indeed, my pet." Lachesis sounds thoughtful now, though she smiles still. "But what's done is done. She's spilled blood to make herself stronger, and the fact that it was her uncle's will only make things more interesting." There's something in her voice that makes the other two look up at her from their mugs, as if there's something that she's not saying, but they don't challenge her.

After all, it _will _be interesting.

"Well, when the time comes, no holding back," Atropos mutters after taking a swig of tea. "Just because we have an interest in this and you two have a soft spot for her doesn't mean we don't do the job properly. We're rightness and justice, and she's a kin-killer. And soon someone will bring us down on her head."

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	2. Chapter 2

**I do not own anything from _Hellsing, _or DC comics _The Sandman._**

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The teenage girl, to the eyes of those who could see her, looked as if she could only be a few years older than the one she was presently watching. Her work done for the moment she sat on the steps leading down to the dungeon with her chin cupped in her hands and her elbows on her knees, observing what was going on a few feet away with great interest.

_"Well, now that that's over,"_ she muttered, her voice in time and overlapping with the younger girl's own words as she stood up, as if she were dubbing a film, _"__who__ exactly__ in the name of Bram S__toker's luck of the Irish are you__, t__hen, oh one who seems to be dressed in bondage gear__?" _

_"Please, little __mistress__,"_ she went on, her voice deepening as the being that wore the shape of a man looked up at the girl and spoke in his turn, _"I am but a poor vampire who __has been locked up in the cellar for twenty years, and it shows!__" _

_"That's all very well, but why the suit?" _While the girl was saying something entirely different she was obviously thinking such a thing, and she and the vampire knew it.

_"Because I __wish __only_ _to be your sexy man slave, since I am all but eating you with my eyes already!"_This was basically true as well; for all his respectful words his red eyes gave away what he truly was, and he was ravenous

_"Oh, I have no time for such things! Come back when I'm older and you're less evil!"_ She chuckled as the younger girl looked away, apparently annoyed, and walked off without looking back at her new servant. She was impressed; it took a brave person to turn their back on a vampire, whether or not the creature served them. "Oh, this should be interesting." She moved out of the way as the girl climbed wearily up the stairs – pausing for an instant, as if she were actually aware of the room's unseen occupant, before moving steadily onward - leaving wet footprints on the stone where she had trodden. She smirked at the one who followed her.

"Good luck with her. Methinks you'll need it," she quipped, and he shot her a _very _dirty look as he trudged after the little lady, trailing blood and other such delightful things. She blew him a kiss and gave him the thumbs up in reply, and he did grin slightly before he walked through the doorway.

"Well, that was fun. Hopefully she won't meet me again for a while." She stood up and brushed herself off, her milky white skin fairly glowing in the shadows of the cellar, and pulled a black top hat out of nowhere. Setting it on her wild hair she turned on her heel and away from the various body parts on the floor, and was gone.

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The first aid kit was in the top drawer of her father's desk as she had hoped. She set it down on the desk itself, brushing the ashtray and the cigarette stubs out of the way, turned on the table lamp, opened the box and used her right hand to pull out plasters and antiseptic wipes to clean the wounds that were already crusting into scabs. She would have to wait until Walter came back tomorrow – no, no, later today, it was past midnight now – if her wounds had to be stitched; he was the only person she even remotely trusted to wield anything sharp near her skin now. She had never had stitches before. She was not looking forward to them.

She sat back in the chair to do her work, the chair that she had watched her uncle lounge in perhaps only an hour or two before, putting his filthy feet on the desk, sprawling in it as if he were a king. It was surprisingly easy to think of the man, considering that his body was lying down in the cellar of the house, dead at her hands, and her own shoes were still stained with his brain matter from when she had walked to the stairs out of that hell hole where there was blood on the floor and walls and ceiling, blood and guts and marrow and pieces of her uncle's skull. They had crunched underneath her feet, like hard-backed insects.

That had been the first time she had actually fired at a living target. The first time that she had killed something, that she had meant to kill something and done it. The first time that she had judged something and found it not worthy of life. Her first kill, and it had been her own blood, her own family. She tried the words and sentences that described what she had done out in her mind, one after another, as she used the mirror in the lid of the box to see what she was doing to her face.

_My uncle is dead. I killed him. I shot him in the head__. I killed __my father's brother.__I trod in his brains and his skull. __I am a murderer._

There was more pain from her wounds than from such thoughts. She felt no guilt, no regret. In fact, each time she thought of a new condemnation for herself she found an argument to squash it, constructing a defence that she did not need in any case. Richard had been dead to her for a good few hours before she shot him. She had not killed him; she had merely killed a whining shell, a blubbering doll that had been broken. He had grazed her face and her arm with his bullets, and would have inflicted much worse before he had dispatched her. He had been trying to kill his brother's daughter. He was less than filth, he deserved to be left to rot and moulder. She had been defending herself against a murderer.

He _tried to __kill _me! _He would have, if my blood hadn't woken __Alucard__, if he hadn't blocked that bullet. He would have murdered me and taken __Hellsing__ for himself.__ His own niece, a twelve__ year old girl,__ three days__ after he _promised_at Father's deathbed __that he would __protect and __watch over me__ and he tried to _kill_ me._

Her face finished and covered up sufficiently to prevent infection, for the moment, she moved on to her left arm and on with her thoughts. Richard was a traitor, to his family and to Hellsing. That was the truth, and the Convention would know it was the truth. But, and this was a very important _but _as far as she was concerned, the possibility remained that they would not wish it to stay the truth. Being in the right would not necessarily save her, if the grown men who might have preferred her uncle as the new leader of Hellsing had their way. Once they found out what she had done, what she and the vampire had done between them, that she had shot Richard and then proceeded to track his brains all over the floors of the house, they might praise her or damn her or do worse.

"What are you thinking of, little master?"

She did not look up directly at his voice, as was no doubt his intention, but she saw from the corner of her eye that her vampire – _her_ vampire, even in her apathetic and annoyed state it still thrilled to even think the words – was now clad in bright arterial red instead of the near black of the straitjacket he had broken out of. It seemed only right that after a return to action, he should choose to put on colours which suited his desires and the mess he had left downstairs.

"Can't you guess?" she replied, as she wiped the injury on her arm one last time and looked for a plaster that was big enough. As her hand reached out towards the box, one was quite suddenly placed into her hand, placed there by white fingers that were cold even through the gloves that covered them. "Thank you. What happened to your hair?" She had looked up now and was surprised to see the new length and colour of that formally white mane, far darker now and barely reaching below his chin. She wondered if he had taken the time to find a pair of scissors, or if he had simply cut through it himself as swiftly and cleanly as he had snatched off the top of that bodyguard's head.

"Form means relatively little to me, little master; I appear as I choose and as it occurs to me to appear." His words were filled with self assurance, perhaps even pride; yet for all that she still noticed that he had been wearing those same gloves in the dungeon. The blood that had dappled them was gone, but unlike the rest of his abnormal costume they were still there, fresh and white now so that the red symbols on the backs of them could be seen more clearly. She would have to get a closer look at them in the future. If the vampire could change the rest of his form yet couldn't be rid of them, it surely meant something important.

He must have noticed that she was distracted, since he spoke again. "I repeat, what are you thinking of, master?" No doubt the creature was intrigued with anything to do with her blood and how she stopped it flowing, or perhaps he was just determined to annoy her.

"I'm thankful that you aren't reading my thoughts for yourself – or that you just can't find the strength to do it yet." She ducked her head to hide her smile at his growl, pretending to be absorbed in applying the plaster to her skin. "At this precise moment, I'm thinking that this hurts quite a lot. It's strange; when I got shot I could ignore the wounds in the wake of something more pressing. When you think you're going to die, pain really matters very little, doesn't it? And now that I'm not going to die I have to put up with the reminders that I _could_ have died, that I was _about _to die…perhaps that I should have died. It's all very morbid."

"It is not if you do not let yourself be caught up in such pointless musings. The wretch who tried to kill you is dead, and you are alive. You should be grateful in your own mortal way that you still breathe, and you should not dwell on the chances you had of perishing…and I could have healed those wounds for you, my master." The vampire sounded more annoyed that he hadn't gotten more of her blood than the fact that her thoughts were particularly morose.

"By licking them, do you mean? Thanks, but no thanks. I don't particularly want your saliva near my bloodstream. Or your fangs, for that matter." She smoothed the plaster down over her skin once more, and snapped the lid of the box shut. She would take no chances with her new servant, even if he had sworn loyalty to her. Who knew if even in the mere touch of his tongue was carried strains of vampirism? It would be a fine joke for him to turn the unsuspecting heir to Hellsing, she was certain, perhaps simply because he could.

"You are worried, my master."

"I am not," she retorted, trying not to sound like a spoiled child as she placed the box back into the drawer, next to a box of her father's cigars. The smell of them rose up to meet her as if it would draw her down into the desk and the embrace of a dead man's symbol, and she hurriedly shut the drawer again.

"You are. I smell your anxiety as surely as if you were sweating it." He had drawn closer now, standing only a few paces away from the other side of the desk. She had to look up now to look into his face, so she stolidly kept her eyes on his dark waistcoat. He wouldn't talk down to her again as long as she lived, she would make sure of that. "Tell me what ails you, little master."

She disliked being called little. She doubted that anyone truly liked being called such a thing at all, young or old. If you were an adult it insulted you in some deep way even if it was meant as an endearment, and if you were a child you took offence because you were not small; it was the rest of the world that was too big. She was not a child because the world was not now big enough for her, and she was not sure if she was an adult. She was someone who had shoes still wet with the blood of the man she had shot. She wasn't little since people would soon start taking notice of her because of what had happened to her and what she had done. She would not be little, simply because she would be too large a problem to overlook.

But Alucard was too big a problem to overlook as well, and that gave them something in common. They were both monsters as well, and that was a second something. If one of them was ruined then probably so was the other, and so they needed to keep each over from ruin in the interest of survival. How odd that she was relying on the very same sort of creature hat she had been taught to destroy!

But in some sick way she was indebted to him. He had saved her life, even if he had threatened it as well, and she had always been taught to respect those who aided her. And really, would it be so very dishonourable to work with the vampire? He had proven himself to be a more honourable creature than Richard and his men; and if you did not have honour, you had nothing. That alone made him more…appealing, than the knights she would have to face today and tomorrow and all the days after that.

"If you must know, I was thinking about Richard – my uncle."

"Why should you do such a thing?" Alucard's face twisted, staring at her as if he would judge her anew and perhaps think the better of his oath of loyalty. "Do you regret killing that sot after all?"

"No. No, I don't regret killing him. He deserved a worse death than the one I gave him." She tapped her fingers on the hard dark wood, cupping her chin in her free hand. "But I worry that his demise isn't the end of this. When I was spying on him, you see, one of his bodyguards said that my appointment to the leadership of Hellsing had gained the Queen's approval; either he must have been very stupid indeed to risk royal anger and punishment by killing me, or-"

"Or he had someone more powerful than he at his back, ready to support him when he emerged victorious after disposing of you." The frown on the vampire's face grew into a smile at his own words. "You think that he had allies in the Round Table, then, or those who wished to control Hellsing with him as a figurehead?"

"It's possible, and if my hunch is true then there's at least one person in the Convention of Twelve or the Round Table who won't be pleased that I'm alive while Richard is dead." She pulled off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She was feeling more and more tired now. When had she last slept? Certainly it wasn't yesterday, because she had spent much of the day hiding in the ventilation shafts of the building with a mouth made dry with terror that someone would hear her and start looking for her, shooting her in the arms and legs and stomach and head. At the time she had grimly appreciated that old phrase: 'There's plenty of time to sleep when you're dead'. And now there was time to feel pain, and to feel exhaustion.

"Are you tired, little master?"

"No, I'm not."

"You are lying. I smell the weariness pouring off you as strongly as your anxiety." As if to emphasise his point, he leaned forward over the desk – when did he get so close? – and took a deep sniff of the air surrounding her, taking away the heat from her skin and leaving her cold. She tried not to breathe in herself, dreading the smell of blood and worse upon him. "You should sleep. Unless you fear what dreams might come to plague you in the night?"

"That won't be a problem." She drew her feet up to rest on the seat of the chair and wrapped her arms about her shins, curling into herself. "I will not rest until Walter returns. He should be back by eight o'clock this morning at the very latest. The staff will not return to the house until they are summoned, I heard one of them say so. We will wait for him, and then we'll decide what to do."

"We?" He gave her yet another scrutinizing look before he went on. "You mean to include me in your little meeting with the Angel of Death?"

She shrugged; an improper action, but then she felt far from proper. "And why not? Strange as it is to say it, Alucard, if that truly is your name, we're in much the same boat. I might very well be charged with the man-slaughter of my oh so delightful uncle, since I doubt even those old men could stomach slapping a murder charge on the late Sir Hellsing's daughter; and if that happens I'll lose my inheritance of the organisation. I might lose it in any case; the knights won't be able to keep their sticky fingers off it."

"It is quite probable."

"You, meanwhile, must have been chained up in that dungeon for _some_ horrid reason or another, so I doubt they'll be pleased that you celebrated your freedom by ripping four men limb from limb and pledging allegiance to me. They'd lock you up again, or do worse." The smile went from Alucard's face quite suddenly at those words as he frowned. _Curiouser__ and __curiouser. _"And your allegiance is possibly the only weapon I have at the moment. If I fall you fall, if you fall I fall, and with us both falls Hellsing. And that is something I won't let happen." She rested her chin on her knees and glared at his waist, no longer looking to his red eyes.

"I see your point, little master, and it is well argued. But you should rest if you do not want to pass out during this most important meeting of yours. Your spirit is willing but your flesh is weak, you might say. And you have shed the blood of your own family; whatever you might say, you are still shocked at what you have done, more shocked than you would ever let yourself feel or be." He had come around the desk by now, so that she watched him from the corner of her eye as he bent over the chair, his red coat actually brushing her shoulder. "And I fancy," he went on, bringing his face close to her ear –a horrible experience, to hear a voice so close and yet not hear or feel the breath that should power it – "that he was your first kill, little master? Am I right? The first one is always special."

She pulled her eyes back to the desk. "For a supposed ally, you act remarkably like an enemy, you know."

"I cannot help it, little master," the vampire fairly cooed. "It is in my nature, you must know; just as it is in your nature to need sleep. Stay here if you wish and rest, and I will wake you in a few hours time."

What could she say to that? "You won't leave the mansion, will you?" She didn't bother asking if he'd try to attack her while she slept; she was defenceless awake or asleep against him in any case if he did decide to kill her, and she suspected that his was the sort of honour that meant she'd be on her feet and aware when her end came, if it came from him. That was comfort, of a sort.

"I will stay be your side, if you wish."

"Then do so." And, with Alucard standing at bay behind her chair and the first of her enemies slaughtered, Integral found it quite easy to fall asleep and, as she always did, never dream.

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	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer: I do not own anything belong to Hellsing or The Sandman. **

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A trip to an old graveyard wasn't exactly the most romantic date Audrey had ever had, but it wasn't the worst either. Rob being the sort of man he was made the experience more interesting than creepy, and she was reminded of all the times her parents had taken her into foreign churches while they were on family holidays to see the tombs of those who had been buried there.

Still, she had felt that she had to ask when he asked her to come along. "You're entertained by being surrounded by dead bodies? They have a word for people like that, you know, Rob. Starts with 'n', ends with 'ecrophilia', if you get my meaning."

To which he had replied in his own charming, bluff sort of way that she secretly adored, tossing his head and gesticulating with his hands as he often did. "Nothing wrong with making a day out of visiting the tombstones. The Victorians used to do it all the time, you know, gloomy bunch that they were; and in medieval times the Germans and the French made a right song and dance about the fact that they were going to die. They actually did, you know. S'where _La Danse Macabre _came from. 'What we were, you are; what we are, you will be.' If it was good enough for them, it's good enough for us."

That was one of the things that she loved about Rob; he could spew off dozens of historical facts as if he had been there for each one. If he'd had the mind for it he could have been a great actor, but he was content to 'be a business man and bring in a decent wage', as he put it.

She was quite glad that she'd agreed to come now. It really was a lovely place for bodies to rest in peace, with lots of beautiful statues on the various graves and tall mausoleums that looked like fancy stone gardening sheds and adorned with the snow that had fallen the night before and which had not yet melted, but it also looked wild and overgrown, a triumph of nature over men after they were dead. None of the dates on the tombstones were terribly recent either, and many of the faces of the angels were dirty and their eyes were completely lost.�Audrey had also been taken to many art galleries when she was a little girl, but she had never liked the statues that had only blank eyes and looked into nothing. You couldn't trust some whose eyes you could not see, made of stone or not.

"Rob, this graveyard hasn't been used in a while, has it?" she asked as she stopped to examine the latest tomb, where a family named Constantine appeared to be buried, along with a memorial to a Lady Johanna Constantine who had died in 1859 and who was apparently buried across seas.

Rob, who had been dawdling behind, came walking up at that with snow crunching under his heavy boots. "Yeah, nobody's posh enough now. This used to be a place where aristocrats got buried, although really they'd let in anyone who was rich enough. Now it just seems a bit pretentious, so the place fell out of use. Whose grave are you examining with a fine tooth comb now?"

"Not a grave, exactly." She scooped a hank of hair behind her ear as she pointed to the dates. "Look at _this_; this woman lived until she was ninety-nine! Pretty good for the early nineteenth century."

"Oh, ninety-nine's nothing, and neither is a hundred, or a thousand. All you have to do is not to die." That was what she _thought _he had said, but when she looked up at him in confusion he seemed to be absorbed in looking at the tombstone. "Johanna Constantine?" he read out, as if he were recognizing the person behind the name.

"Old girlfriend?" she asked teasingly as she stood up, pulling her hair out of her face again. It really was too long now; either she'd have to start tying it back or she'd get it cut. Rob liked to run his fingers through it, for some odd reason, so tying back it would be.

"Not bloody likely."

"Two hundred years too old for _you_, I should think. And we're drifting back to necrophilia again, you know."

"Oi!" Now he sounded annoyed, and looked it as well. "I was just thinking that I recognised the name from somewhere, woman!"

"Really? Oh, then here's another one you might know." She had run on and found another interesting and rather familiar name. "'In loving memory of Sophia Gadling, who died in the year 1810 at the age of fifty-seven' – that sounds more like it – 'and in memory of Robert Gadling, lost at sea in 1811, who rests beneath the waters until the final day.' Coincidence or what? You know, they could have been related to you, Rob."

"Could be. It's not exactly a common surname."

She grinned over at his sombre face. "So, dear old Rob is annoyed I might have found out something about his family before he told me? Shock! Horror! Will he ever forgive me?"

His only reply was to turn away, rather stiffly, and her humour went as well to be replaced by guilt sitting in her stomach like a sharp rock. "Oh, Robbie darling, look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to tease you. I know how you feel about your family-"

He stopped her by turning around and giving her a great bear hug, pulling her close to him, speaking into her neck all warm and soft: "No, you don't. You really don't. And that's my fault. It's just that my family and I…we don't really talk anymore. Not really. I might talk about them some day, I promise you, but not yet."

And Audrey, who couldn't know that she would die almost seven years from now when she was hit by a drunk driver, or that Rob would only tell her the whole truth about himself and his past when she was three days buried, smiled back at the man she felt she was going to love for the rest of her life, and kissed him softly and tenderly amid the many grave stones and tombs and snow.

"Come on, silly boy. Let's get back to the flat and have something to eat. You're all chilly."

"Yeah. Yeah, okay. I've seen enough here."

It was as they were walking to the entrance that they happened upon the funeral party only a little way further up the hill, so close that she could make out their faces. There was only one woman among the mourners, with long dark hair and large old fashioned glasses; but there was also a girl with white-gold hair and creamy brown skin, an odd but pleasing combination, standing next to a dapper old gent with a monocle and grey in his hair. As�Audrey forgot herself and stared, the girl looked up and seemed to catch sight of them, staring at them coolly before looking away.

"We should go," Rob muttered in her ear, and he was hurrying her away with such speed she wondered if someone wasn't coming after them.

"I thought you said nobody was buried here any longer?" she muttered, doing her best not to look around.

"Well, evidently I was wrong, wasn't I? Come on, we don't want to get tangled up with them." 

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Integral watched the couple hurry out of sight as Walter leant forward slightly and muttered into her ear: "Would you like me to follow them, Miss Hellsing?"

She considered the pros and cons of such a venture (she had to think before she spoke even more now, only far more quickly and with more that could go wrong depending on her decision) before shaking her head. "I doubt they were here in connection with the funeral. Perhaps visiting the grave of an ancestor or something like that."

"Shhh!" Sir Penwood hushed her in a far louder tone than hers. She stolidly kept her eyes on her father's coffin and thought evil thoughts at him. She did not look up at the other knights, she did not look up at her uncle's supposed mistress Anatolia, she did not look up at Walter. The winter air was cold upon her cheeks and her nose and her lips. She looked only at the coffins, side by side, one holding her father and the other what they had scraped together of Richard. The morticians had done a relatively good and quick job on him, building his face up with wax and reattaching his arm, though only a few had been allowed to view the body before it was put into the coffin in any case.

It seemed to be taking forever to get to the point and place the coffins in the graves dug in the Hellsing grave site, and she _wanted_ it to take forever, for as long as she stood here she was close to her father, and as long as she stood here she would not have to walk away and go somewhere else and have to face down the knights and see if the important select few of them would accept the fact that she had killed her uncle. They were the ones that would not look at her except out of necessity, perhaps worried that she might turn a gun upon them as well. It was both comic and tragic. For as long as she stood here she could blissfully do nothing, say nothing, feel nothing, think nothing, worry about nothing.

_This must be what it is like before an execution. _She had been taught about the Tudors by her home tutors, about Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard and Mary, Queen of Scots ("Never forget the comma, Miss Hellsing: she was Mary, _the _queen of Scots," a pointless fact to be hammered home if ever there was one) and she had always wondered why they had been so calm when they were about to die. She hadn't worked it out at first, when the prospect of her own death was facing her, for she had been frantic and desperate and longing for someone to save her. Now, standing by her father's grave and the grave of the man that she had killed, she understood. If you could not escape something, as Anne and Katherine and Mary had not been able to, then it was best to go with grace, not to rail and scream and weep uselessly in your last few moments but simply to breathe, to savour every breath you took, to make every moment count as you had not for so much of your life.

It was like very early yesterday morning. She had complained to Alucard about the pain she felt, but truthfully she had taken a sweet, secret joy in it. It was like sitting out in the garden early yesterday afternoon and watching the sun, because it was something she had almost never seen again. It was like now, when she stood and breathed in and out, glorying in the moment that she longed would last forever.

But at last the deed was done, and the coffins disappeared behind the earth, and all the mourners turned away, and she turned away too, because though she had loved her father and loved him still and would always love him in some quiet corner of her heart, he was dead and she was alive, and she was going to live. Anatolia walked past Walter and Integral without a word – not that she would wish for anything from _that_ woman – as the knights muttered their condolences at the woman's loss. They did not seem to dare to speak to _her_, the one who was truly bereaved, but parted for her as she walked away from her father's tomb, because her uncle was dead and she was alive, and she had dared to choose to live.

It was not until they had reached the car – in fact, not until Walter was opening the door for her to get in – that she heard a hail from behind her. It was Sir Islands, a close friend of her father and a man worth listening to, for the most part. She turned to watch him as he approached, wrapped up in a long dark coat and with his glasses misted over so that she could hardly see his eyes.

"Good morning, Sir Islands." She kept her eyes on his face as she spoke. She had been taught how to behave in front of her superiors, but she took no heed of that training now. She had transcended every type of subjugation when she had yelled into a vampire's face that she would never surrender, when she had aimed a gun at the man who would have killed her because she was young and small and weak and in his way, and pulled the trigger.

"Good morning to you too, Miss Hellsing." Islands stamped his feet and stared coolly down at her, for all as if he might be the one that had backed Richard's attempt and was wondering how he could dispose of her now. She felt the comforting warmth of Walter at her back and did not move. "I should tell you, you are to be summoned before the Convention of Twelve later this afternoon. They wish to question you more closely upon what happened the night before last."

"Sir Islands, with all respect, Miss Hellsing has not had much rest in the past few days and has only just seen her father buried. Surely you can-"

"It's all right, Walter." Truthfully, she wanted this. She wanted to face the knights, to dare them to tell her that what she had done was wrong, that she would be punished for it. She wanted to face them and show them that she would not give up, that she would die before surrendering, that she was the leader of Hellsing and that she had lived to be the leader of Hellsing and that she would be the leader of Hellsing until she died. "I will see the Convention of Twelve, Sir Islands, I promise you. Until this afternoon, then."

"Until this afternoon, Miss Hellsing." She was about to turn to get into the car when, to her surprise, Islands actually held his hand out to her. She fancied it was rather in the spirit of someone being given a handshake by their comrade before they went to the gallows, but she took his hand anyway and shook it firmly before he turned and walked away from her.

"Back to the mansion, then, Miss Hellsing?" She looked up from her fingers to Walter, who still held the door open even if he had quite forgotten that he was doing so. She nodded and got into the car at last.

"Walter," she asked once he had gotten in and safely closed the driver's door, "I'm asking for your opinion on this; should I bring Alucard with me when I go to meet the knights?" She had considered ordering the vampire to accompany her to the meeting, but she was already having second and third thoughts about that. If he deliberately disobeyed her in front of all those old men, that would do nothing for her authority and capability in their eyes. "You know him better than I. Would he behave if I brought him?"

He said nothing for a time, starting the car and driving from the cemetery. It wasn't until they were on the open road that he answered her. "You must remember, Miss Hellsing, that Alucard tends to behave differently towards different people. Those who have won his respect he treats with respect in turn, or at least as much respect as he can afford to give. You and I have that dubious honour, but the knights…well, let us merely say that Alucard has no patience for those who do not appreciate his talents, or his power."

"Meaning that the knights will probably want to lock him up again." She stared at the back of Walter's head until another thought came to her. "Walter? Why was Alucard imprisoned in the cellar? What did he do that made Father order such a thing?"

Walter's voice was curiously regretful as he answered. "For the truth of that, Miss Hellsing, you would have to ask Alucard himself. I was only told that he had turned against some of the soldiers and so was deemed too dangerous to remain free, and there certainly were quite a few dead bodies in the entrance hall to back up your father's story. But I had been with Hellsing long enough by then that I could recognise the signs of a cover-up when I saw them. "

Integral said nothing to that, but looked out of the window. It was beginning to snow again. 

* * *

The witch woman Anatolia had decided not to act until after the burial of the two Hellsing brothers. She needed to be sure of what exactly she would do, and she also needed time to get the items that she needed. She was not cowardly by any means, but those she would need to call upon had no love for her, and had not for millenia.

So she had gone to the funeral and had ignored the stares of those boorish men and their hushed wonderings of what exactly Richard had seen in her, and she ignored the pointless twittering of the priest that followed the god who had been butchered on a tree, and she ignored the snow and the cold and only looked at the young girl who followed her father's coffin out of the church and to his grave.

She had been told in a falsely conciliatory tone that Richard had been killed by a sniper, a tragic loss. She knew that the only thing tragic about his death was the fact that he had obviously wasted his opportunities and paid the price for failing, and she knew when she was being told a lie. But as she had looked at Integral Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing in her dark dress and dark shoes and dark beret, with her cool blue eyes that had seen death but had not necessarily caused it, it had been one of the few times that she had felt doubt. She was sure of what the girl had done.

But she was not certain, not quite certain.

She waited until anyone and everyone had left the cemetery before doubling back and bending down by Richard's grave. It took the work of a moment to seize a handful of the soil and slip it into a small velvet pouch, and then she stood and walked away. She was done with Richard, but she was far from done with the one who had killed him.

As soon as she had returned to her flat she set about clearing a space upon the floor among the many books she owned and had borrowed, and it took only a little time before the ceremony had been set up and she sat on the floor. No petty candles or circles need be drawn in this case, no idiotic neo-paganry or whatever it was called these days. There was only her craft, honed and perfected over the centuries.

She placed a picture of the crossroads and the crescent moon on the floor before her, along with a tarot card of the Hanged Man. The various animals she had rented from a pet shop, and she had gotten the black lamd's blood from a butcher she was familiar with. She set it in a bowl, where it rippled against the sides.

"I call to you," she intoned, "Maiden, Mother and Crone. I call to you, I who have served the Three in One and the One in Three. I call to you."

"We hear you." Despite all her years, she still had to keep herself from jumping when she heard those words come from where there had been nothing before. There were no showy effects, no flashes of light or slow appearances; they were there as if the air had been shaped into them faster than even her eyes could see. It had been the Maiden who had spoken, perched sideways on a chair with one leg crossed over the other and showing them off to best advantage.

"We always come to those who ask, my dumpling." The Mother sat in Anatolia's favourite armchair, a bundle of knitting in her lap and slippers on her feet. She smiled and her smile was both comforting and cold. He fingers never stopped moving, the metal sound of the needles clashing together resounding about the room.

"Even if it is to arrogant chits like you who don't know when to die." The Crone was the only one who still looked the same since the last time she had witnessed the Three in the flesh, so to speak; she hunched by the door to the flat in a black cloak that defied any time or fashion period, her grey hair hanging over her face and a scowl upon her lips. "What do you want, then?"

Three questions. That was the rule that she must never forget in magic that concerned them; three questions only, no more. But she was an old hand, and she knew how to make them count. "Gracious ladies, tell me, for I must know; did Integral Hellsing kill her uncle, Richard Hellsing?"

"What makes you think we know?" the Maiden asked, leaning back in the chair and clasping her knee with her hands, looking impossibly like someone off the cover of a fashion magazine. She looked out of the corner of her blue eyes at Anatolia, a look that told her what the Three thought of her, and while it was not as bad as she had feared, it was bad enough that a mortal might try anything to escape from that gaze.

"You would know," she retorted. "If it had happened at the beginning of time or at the end of time, you would know. It is your job to know."

"You are right, my pigsney. We do know. The great horrid brute chased the poor little darling down to the cellars. He taunted her and wounded her, and then he would have shot her dead. But he and his men were overcome by something greater than they, and then she took his gun and shot _him _dead." The Mother smiled down at her knitting. "Rather pleased with that, we were."

Her reasoning had worked truly, as always. If she had been wrong, the results would have been far from pleasant. The Three did not like being summoned for no purpose. Satisfied and more than a little relieved, the witch woman moved onwards. "Gracious ladies, tell me, for I must know; will Integral Hellsing be punished for what she did?"

The Crone cackled, showing her few teeth. "Hardly! Those useless dolts won't dare to charge her with anything – they fear her servants, and they fear her, and they fear that she is in the right and they are in the wrong."

"And before you ask your last question, little witch," the Maiden said, sitting upright and putting out a finger to halt her words, "answer ours first. Tell us, what was Richard Hellsing to _you?"_

Anatolia considered this, choosing her words carefully, for words were everything in making a request of the Three, the Ladies, the Weird Sisters, whatever role they happened to fill. She could not cross the Three, for they could make her pay most dearly. "Many have said that I was Richard's mistress. That couldn't be further from the truth. We never shared a bed, though he wanted to. Rather, we shared ambitions. Richard was not particularly wise or important, but he had one of the greatest ambitions I had ever seen, even if it was backed by stubbornness and stupidity. He wanted to be head of his family's organisation, and so achieve great power. I wanted the magic that I heard dwelt in bonds within the Hellsing family home, magic which I thought would protect me when the world turned against me at last." She smiled with no humour. "We made a pact; if he found a way to become the candidate for the leader of Hellsing, I would support him with all the craft that I knew, and in return he would give me access to the great magic that I so desired.

"Richard was not a good man. I know this all too well, since I have known many good and bad men in my time. He was stupid in many ways, vain, ignorant; he held little regard for many if not all of those around him. He pretended to love his niece when she was a child and then turned against her when her father was dead. But he was good to me. He gave me access to books and archives I never would have had if not for him. He was my ally when I choose to make very few allies. He was my way to new power. And, if nothing else, he was mine to kill, should he ever have turned against me."

She looked up at the Three. "And now my final question. Gracious ladies, tell me, for I must know; will you do your duty and avenge this murdered man's blood, and take retribution on the one who condemned him to a bed of grave soil?" She reached for the pouch and opened it and spilled the earth upon the wooden floor boards.

The Mother smiled with suddenly sharp teeth as she lowered her knitting. One of the corners broke and slipped from her lap to land on the floor, where it quickly righted itself and flexed its sting before it scuttled away into the pile of books. "You call us down upon her, then, my little viper?"

The witch woman never hesitated when she came to the kill, as was her custom. "I do."

The Maiden and the Crone both laughed, the Maiden letting her head fall back to reveal the pink slice of her tongue and the fangs that lengthened, changing the shape of her jaw, the Crone barking her laughter like a dog or a wolf with flecks of spittle. "Oh, you have no idea what you'll owe us, little bitch-witch, for this."

**0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000**

**Anatolia is not an original character; if you've read The Sandman, you might well know who she is. If you haven't, well, she's still not an original character. Try and guess where I got the name from!**

**And for anyone who **_**has **_**read The Sandman, and is annoyed if I got the name of the woman in The Kindly Ones whose grave Hob goes to visits wrong, then I apologise. I thought her name was something along the lines of Nora, but I couldn't remember. This is embarrassing, since I do actually own that volume…but it's at home, I'm at university, I can't check, so meh. When I find out what the woman's name actually was, I'll change the chapter, unless I was right. Until then, stick with Nora.**

**Edit: The woman was called Audrey. So I've fixed it. Happy?**

**�****Reviews for the half-Irish seamstress!**


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer: I do not own Hellsing or The Sandman. Sigh.**

* * *

The portrait of his former master was obviously a fairly recent one, but the new facial hair did nothing to cease reminding him of the very first Hellsing that he had encountered. Only a few generations apart meant that despite a change in hair colour Arthur very much resembled his damned forebear, down to those Dutch blue eyes, and Alucard was more than a little certain that this had been used to torment him in all the years before those two decades of incarceration and relative peace and quiet. He had had dreams about that one, that one who had loomed over him and impaled him in his own house, his own sanctuary, and who had cut him open upon an operating table. Every descendant of his was a reminder of that pain and shame, and those nightmares.

_Well, it begins again. At least this one only has those wretched blue eyes._

Those eyes were watching him closely, he knew, as he made a show of looking closely at each individual painted hair in his former master's beard. The girl was tired and quietly angry as well, but he could tell that only by her scent and not by any sign in her demeanour. Such an unfathomable little creature she was, so cool and reserved; if she had behaved this way in front of the knights she might well have driven them into distraction. He found himself quite pleased.

"I suppose you want to know what happened at the Round Table." Flat and without query, the girl's words interrupted what had actually become quite an intriguing activity.

"I am all agog, little master." He turned to look at her and found her to be watching him intently, curiously. This he was used to, as he was used to people longing to study him, to cut him open and apart to find out what he was, to try to cut deep enough to see if he had a mind and soul left. What was different here was that Arthur's daughter looked at him not to dissect but to understand by some other method, by words instead of mere weapons. She looked at him as a puzzle she must solve with time and effort, not a door to be wrenched open to find the goal at once.

"Tell me why you were staring at my father's beard." She sounded more alive now, less like some recording of a long dead person, but it still was not a question. She did not want him to answer, she expected him to. And he would answer, but not necessarily truthfully.

"I was seeing if it suited him. He was clean shaven when last we met."

"I see." She was looking now at his brow. Sensible girl. Keeping eye contact with such a thing as he for long was a dangerous thing to do. "None of the knights seem to like you that much. At least five of them want you killed outright. Four of them want you put back in the dungeon, and three of them want you to be experimented on _again _to make sure that you are still obedient to the Hellsing house. You must have been very busy before you were locked up."

Again she did not make it into a question. It invited him to speak further while not commanding him, not now, not yet. She would learn.

"I was indeed."

She looked at him for a beat of her heart, another beat, and then she looked away. She would want to know. Of course she would want to know, but it seemed she was content to let the matter rest for now. Unless she had already asked the butler, but Walter would have had no answers.

"What will you do now?" he continued, drawing ever closer, ever nearer to where she sat. He was free to ask questions as she was not. He was free to tie her down and cut open her mind to see what she was. She would have to live long enough and be patient enough to slice him open carefully, stripping away pieces. It was a task her father and even Walter had never truly managed, but she was young enough and had hands clever and steady enough to perhaps achieve her desire.

"That remains to be seen. I've studied enough history to know that monarchs who are too young have a regent to run the country until they come of age. Whether I can wait until I'm sixteen to be rid of some old fart should be interesting." She sat back in her seat as she pursed her lips. "Besides, who _can _I trust? The knights will have me for now, and they'll let me keep you out of the cellar, but what then? Any one of them might be Judas, plotting a new way of disposing of me for the promise of silver." She looked over at the sound which he had already been aware of, the butler's steps upon the floor outside, and then back to him. "At the moment I only have you and Walter to protect me. For some odd reason, I feel relieved."

"Why is that?" So solemn, even when discussing her possible assassination, so mature and unafraid. She reminded him of girls mature before their time that he had seen in the centuries before this one – not the teenaged nymphets of brothels that royalty so liked to visit, but the prepubescent noblewomen from the ages when children had to grow from innocence into knowledge very quickly. Had this small being ever truly been a child, or even had the chance to be one, brought up as she had been between his old companion in execution and such a man as Arthur Hellsing?

His spoken question went unanswered, as Walter opened the study door and entered bearing a loaded tea tray. The Angel of Death serving his new mistress tea, the assassin who had grown old cemented in the tasks of a butler. It was yet one more part of the strangeness that surrounded this new director.

"How do the stitches feel, if I might ask, Miss Hellsing?" the mortal asked now as he set the tray down in front of her and swiftly began to serve the boiled plant juice that the humans of today so liked. He stood and watched those old hands which were still quite adept with those wires that had sliced apart so much flesh and bone, and which now lifted up a tea pot and poured the girl a cup. What _fun_ to see another predator retired from the chase and pressed into servitude! Could Walter have ever thought that he would come to such a pass as this?

She took a gulp of the liquid, meanwhile, wincing only slightly from the pain in her cheek, and the sound of her swallowing echoed before she answered the butler, as if she were empty of everything; as if she were merely a hollow doll. "They feel fine, Walter. They don't hurt as much as they did before. Thank you for your good work." Then there was more silence as she drank, and went on drinking. It was all very familiar indeed, and when he managed to catch Walter's eye he winked and opened his mouth in what humans might call a smile. Arthur had always said that he had far too many sharp teeth for any smile coming from him to be comforting. The butler did not smile back. Now, why could that be?

She sighed as she put the cup down at long last. "All right. Both of you want to know how it went." Still there was no question. She did not make assumptions, not this one. "The Round Table have agreed that I will be the new leader, but with some conditions. Firstly, that I have someone to supervise my actions and decisions until the age of sixteen, when they deem that I will be responsible enough for full leadership."

Walter muttered that he would have expected such of them. She agreed with him, "but I'm doing the best that I can to make sure that the supervisor will be _you_, Walter, since you will be one of my tutors from here onwards. They'll be keeping an eye on the budget, on the soldiers employed, on everything. I'll be under close scrutiny until they're certain that I won't go mad or run the organization into the ground. And I have to report on my progress regularly, in person." She clasped her hands as if she were trying to see which hand could crush the other first. Her scent was sharp with rage now, her heart quick with it.

"At least they are not threatening to vivisect you, little master." His quip did something to dilute her anger, though she did not smile. Why should she? But she nodded in agreement and let her hands go.

"Not yet, anyway. But I have a feeling they'll all but crucify me before they're satisfied. They want to test me until I break. Perhaps it will amuse them." She reached out and traced the rim of the cup. "I will just have to disappoint them."

"What about your sot of an uncle? Have they deemed him a traitor?" He enjoyed the way that her eyes narrowed at his words but the rest of her stayed as still as a human could.

"Publicly they've put about that he was shot by an assassin. At least they didn't make up some lie about him 'protecting me' when it happened; they must have known I wouldn't stand for that. But the Convention know the truth, because I told them myself. And they would do well to remember what happened to him."

"Miss Hellsing." Walter's voice did not cut her off, she had said enough in any case. She pulled a piece of paper towards her and began to look at it. Walter moved back to the door, and he clearly wished for him to follow. His little master did even seem to be aware of them any more, and so he would obey his human comrade and leave her be, until the next time that they met.

Walter closed the door behind them, which he found faintly ridiculous, and moved to stand in front of it. Even more ridiculous.

"What happened at this meeting, oh Angel of Death?"

"Why do you ask me? Why not defer to your new master?"

"Because you were there at the time. Because you are closer to her. You know her better. If she does not care for you, then she at least trusts you, something that she is sensible enough not to do to me. Especially if she has asked you why I was sealed away to begin with. Because she is the daughter, not the father."

Walter looked at him with one eyebrow raised, the human way of showing confusion, and something that he only allowed himself to do around the non-human. And then he said, "She faced them, Alucard, and stared them down. She showed no fear. She met what might have been her end like a Hellsing. Make of that what you will."

What was there to say to that? He let himself smile again, and loosen and drift back down to where he had come from. A new Hellsing, and _such _a Hellsing.

* * *

Such a nice house.

Such a big house.

So hard to enter.

So hard to find what we want inside it.

It is easy for us to enter. We always find a way in.

Easy to find what we want. We always find what we want.

The butler does not see us, he does not know we are there. We may pass him.

And there she is.

She has such golden hair, and such brown skin, and such blue eyes. Such a serious little thing. So like her mother, and so like her father too. We knew them, oh yes. And we know her too. We've woven her, when we were someone else, and now we may unpick her.

She is busy working. She reads different sheets of paper, different reports. When she looks at the clock on the wall she sees it is nearly half eleven. Her servant will not be pleased that she has stayed up so late, something that she had done only once before in all her life. She will have to call it a night and go to bed, and tomorrow it will all begin again, for the rest of her life for however long it lasts.

She looks over at the door, and she sees with a mild interest that quickly sprouted into worry (but not fear, she had never been afraid of the dark) that one of the shadows on the far wall is much, too much, deeper that it has any right to be. She sees where we await our entrance.

She thinks. Vampires need an invitation to come into a house, and no one here would be likely to issue one.

But then there already is one in the house, isn't there?

One in the cellar, oh yes, _we _know where he is.

One who is tricky, so tricky.

One who can change his shape at will.

One who got away.

If he is trying to scare her yet again, she will show him yet again that she is made of rather sterner stuff. Perhaps he still thinks her to be like another sort of girl, raised fearing monsters under the bed and what the dark might hide, needing to sleep with the light on or not at all.

Directly she looks at us and loudly she says, "Stop hiding yourself. If you want to speak to me, come and face me outright."

Oh, how brave.

What can we do but do as she says?

We are not as showy as her servant. There is no swirl of shadows and no emergence of red and the one who wore it; there is simply a twist and then we are there, time and space has twisted to allow us in.

No, it is not Alucard. She does not know what it is, but it is not Alucard. And there is more than one of us, for we are the three in one and the one in three. Our teeth are sharp, but what sort of teeth they are she couldn't say. There are things that rustle and hiss and click about us, but whether they grow from our heads or are held in our hands she cannot tell. Whether we are all the same age or whether one is young, one is middle aged and one is old she does not know, and we will not let her know. But there we are, standing at the end of the room, and we look at her, and she has never seen anything as horrible, ever.

She knows that at least. Clever girl.

She finds it quite hard to speak, because for some reason it is difficult to breathe, but at last she manages it. She does not feel her lips move, but she hears her voice all the same as she lets the words out. "How did you get in here?"

We speak as one. "We always find a way in, Integral Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing. And we have found our way to you."

"And what do you want?"

"You think that we will kill you. You are wrong. We will not kill you."

"What will you do, then?"

"We will perform our function. We are the Eumenides. The Kindly Ones."

"I've read about you. You have less attractive names than those."

"Then you know what we will do to you."

"You'll punish me, for killing Richard. You hunt down those who have killed their family."

"We hunt them down, yes. And we torment them. We torture them. We drive them mad. And we destroy them at last, when there is nothing left of them, nothing but babbling and shrieks and pleas for death that has not been granted to them. And we will do the same to you."

"That is not fair."

"It is fair. We are the Erinyes, the Furies. We are justice itself."

"But he would have killed me. Twice he tried to do it. He shot me in the face and the arm. He would have killed me, so I killed him."

"And if he _had _killed you and one had called us down upon him, we would have hounded him to the ends of the world and to the end of his life. Is that not fair?"

"No, I rather think it isn't."

"Well, no matter. It does not matter what _you_ think, for it does not change our will. We will do our task. We will destroy everything that is yours. We will destroy everything that you love. And when you are broken and weeping and lost, then, Integral Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing, we will destroy _you."_

A twist, a blink, and we are gone, to her eyes.

But we stay to watch.

She looks at the clock and sees that it is twenty-eight minutes to twelve. Enough time for her to have dozed, and perhaps to have imagined what has just happened. She gets up from the chair, pleased that her hands hardly tremble, and walks to the door at a steady pace and not a run.

The hallway is brightly lit and it hurts her eyes. Her butler is still there; still upright and vigilant even after four hours. He looks around at her and his eyes widen. "Miss Hellsing?" It's the most startled that he's ever sounded in her hearing, even more taken aback than he was when he had returned that bloody morning and seen the state of her and what she'd released from the cellar. He reaches out and takes her arm as if he expects her to keel over at any moment. "Miss Hellsing, you should not have stayed up so late. In the future you should-"

"Walter, you know Alucard's methods fairly well. Has he been anywhere near here in the last half hour? Could you tell if he had been?"

His face creases in thought at her words, no doubt playing back every incident in his life that had ever involved the vampire; he has an excellent memory and can prove it. "No," he says. "No, he has not."

"You're certain?"

"I would know. I have been around him long enough to be able to tell. And you would know as well, Miss Integral, better than I."

"All right, then." She pulls her arm away from his hand so she can rub her eyes. She feels queer in her stomach, as if she has eaten something that her body did not approve of and wished to get rid of as swiftly as possible. "All right," she repeats slowly, pulling her glasses off and putting the world out of perspective for a few breaths. She is afraid now, we know.

"Walter," she says, "I may be in some trouble." Oh, you are, you are, my girl.

There someone in the cellar. Shall we go down to see him again?

No, best not. He knows we are here. Besides, he does not fear us any longer, since we cannot touch him. Let us not go to him.

Let us depart, for now.

We will see her again, soon.

Who first?

Someone she cares for?

Does she care for anyone?

She cares what people think.

Strike at that which supports her position.

And down she will fall.

Such a pity.

* * *

**Sorry for taking so long with this. I have a definite idea of where I want this story to go; it's making the transition that's difficult. Also, it's rather hard writing from Alucard's point of view. Eh.**

**For anyone who hasn't read Sandman, the three ladies who Anatolia contacted last chapter are also the Furies. And the Fates. And the general idea of the Maiden, Mother and Crone. They're even an aspect of Eve. And do not piss them off, for you shall surely pay for it.**

**Reviews for the half-Irish seamstress!**


	5. Interlude

**Disclaimer: I do not own Hellsing, nor do I own The Sandman.**

* * *

There is a garden with many pathways, pathways that fork and cross over, that divide and return together, each one depending upon the path that had been trodden upon before. And perhaps if you walked that maze and looked behind you, you would see your chosen path carved out behind you and all other routes gone, and you would have no choice but to go ever onwards, into eventual darkness.

And Destiny walks along one of those many paths in his garden. His cloak trails in the dust behind him and his footprints barely last before they are gone, and he casts no shadow. But none of these surprise him, for they have been his lot since he came into the universe and was given the book that is forever chained to his wrist; and also because it is written in the book that his cloak trails behind him and his footprints barely last and he casts no shadow.

Destiny is blind, but still he sees the path ahead of him and at the same time the letters on the page that the book is open at. He has known that this time would come, of course, for the book had said so, but still it is in some way good to read that Dream, his brother, will soon be free. The book says that he will be released by sheer accident on the part of his captors, and that he will take his revenge on the son of the one who had trapped him, and it will be terrible. And then he will return to his home, the Dreaming, and will find out what has happened in his absence…

Destiny turns a page of his book, and now the fate of his brother gives way to an occurrence of the past. It is rare that Destiny looks backwards, for that destiny is completed and done, but there are times when he does so, and this is one past that is connected in part to what will happen.

He reads the line, 'Fifty one years in the measuring of mortals after the Dream King was captured and imprisoned by the human Roderick Burgess and the Order of Ancient Mysteries, in the Dreaming there appeared a black, red eyed dog which was not a dog, and it was passing by the path that led up to the tall House of Secrets and the broad House of Mystery. The dog would have walked on by, but it saw two brothers sitting outside the House of Secrets and recognised them, and so it walked up the path so that it would get closer to them.

One of the brothers, who was short and stout and had hair so black that it was blue and a stammer that only went away when he was telling a story, was the first to see the dog and was eager to tell his brother. "O-o-ooh, b-brother, l-l-look," he said, "a d-d-doggie,"; and he would have patted the dog as it came within reach. But his brother, who was tall and wiry and had hair the colour of wood and a voice that is compared to that of Vincent Price, seized his hand and pulled it roughly away from the dog, saying, "Fool! Don't you know what that is?"

And then, turning to the dog and glaring at it, for he recognised it in turn, he said, "And what are _you_ doing here, eh? Last I heard, you and the Dream King weren't getting on too well. The only reason he didn't punish you for your insolence was because you were already in enough torment to satisfy even him."

The dog sat back on its haunches as it listened to these words, and it was so big that it towered over the taller brother, so he stood up to be taller still. It looked at him with its red eyes, but it did not part its mouth to show its teeth because it knew that no one and nothing was allowed to harm the taller brother. Satisfied, the taller brother went on, "And if you're here to ask him a favour, you're even more out of luck. He's gone. Has been gone for some years, now, as a matter of fact. Left us all high and dry, and left the Dreaming to go to rack and ruin."

The dog growled at that, and snorted through its nose. The shorter brother looked up from his study of his knees at that and said, "B-but _Cain_, he m-might c-come _back_, d-don't you think?"

"Shut up, Abel," said Cain at once, before turning his attention back to the great black dog. "You could go on up to the castle, if you wanted, or what's left of it; but they wouldn't let someone like _you_ in. Not after all the things that you've done."

The dog looked at him, and then it looked very slowly from him to Abel, who was humming and staring into nothing and trying not to do anything at all to upset his brother further; and then it looked back at Cain and tilted its head in a rather human manner. And somehow, without words or even an expression, it still managed to imply that it had never done nearly as much as Cain, or the Dream King himself.

Cain huffed and crossed his arms. "Stupid mutt," he said. "I hope you're miserable back in the waking world. Do those humans who caught and bound you make you stay in this form all the time, or do you just have to wear it because his Nibs forbade you to appear here as anything else? Guess he did have a sense of humour after all."

The dog closed its eyes at these words, and then it opened them again, and also opened three other pairs of eyes on its head that until then had been tightly closed and were also red; and even Cain, who had seen many strange and terrible things, and who knew that nothing and no one was allowed to hurt him, took a step back at the sight of the beast with eight red eyes.

Abel looked around his brother to see what was going on, and then smiled at the dog even though he was very afraid and sweating by this time. "I-I think L-Lucien – you k-know Lucien? The t-t-_tall_ one w-with the g-_glasses, _and the s-sticking up b-brown hair? I th-_think_ he's s-still in the castle, in the l-library," he told it. "You c-c-could go and ask h-_him_ if he knows w-where L-Lord M-Morpheus is. He p-probably d_-doesn't_ know, but he m-_might_."

The dog nodded to him – another human gesture, unwittingly – and closed all but one pair of its eyes, and stood and set off back down the path. Half way down it stopped when there was a cry of pain that was quickly smashed, and it turned about to see Cain standing over the prone body of Abel with a bloody shovel held over his head. The man and the dog looked at each other, and then the dog went on its way and left Cain to his business, which was burying the blade of the shovel in his brother's throat.

The dog walked on. After much time had passed – and in the Dreaming time is fluid and can be scrunched up into a second or pulled out into eternity – the dog came at last to the gates of the castle of the Dream King, the one who had ruled the Dreaming and should have been ruling the Dreaming now. At the entrance were the statues of a wyvern dragon, a griffin and a winged horse; at another time the dog would wait to be permitted to enter by the will of the owner of the castle, but now it walked past the statues and into the castle with impunity.

It soon found the library among the wrecks of rooms, and it soon saw the tall librarian with his glasses and his fly-away brown hair who had stayed when everyone else seemed to have fled, despondently sorting a pile of books. It walked up to him and tugged on the back of his thread-bare tail-coat with its mouth, startling him, and his eyes widened behind his glasses as he turned and saw the beast.

"Who are…you? It's _you?_ It really _is_ you!" The librarian, Lucien, put down the book he held and peered at the dog, before remembering himself and drawing back. "Ah, forgive me. It has been so long since anyone visited, and of all people to come back to this abandoned place I never thought that it would have been _you."_

The dog did part his lips this time, and smiled as only dogs and no other mortal creature on earth, save humans or those who look like humans, can do. This smile, still without words, managed to give the impression that the dog, too, found the irony astounding and amusing.

"The last I heard of you, you'd apparently greatly angered my lord. He said that he should have taken away the gift he so graciously bestowed upon such a wretched creature, never mind his sister's regard for you, but that it would be pointless since you were in no position to use it any longer." The tall man tapped his chin with his finger, waxing philosophical. "Clearly he was wrong on that count, though your power seems rather limited at present. Perhaps because you are bound on earth, in more ways than one. Can you even speak right now? Or is that merely because of the absence of the lord? Did you come to look for the master? No, of course not." He shook his head at his own last question. "You came because you thought he might help you to contact _her," _and as he said that the dog whined. The librarian nodded at his own cleverness.

"She came here, I do not know how long ago exactly. She did not stay long, she was saddened by the state into which her brother's realm had fallen. I told her for how long he had been missing, how he had gone off on business, far, oh so far away, and how he never came back. I…leant her a book."

The dog stared at him for a time, and then to Lucien's surprise it lay down upon the floor.

"You mean to stay? To wait? Until one of them returns?" he asked. "But do your…masters not require your service? You are their servant, after all."

The dog raised its head to give him as withering a look as a dog, dream or real, can manage, and then set its head down upon its folded paws. The librarian sighed as he gave into a defeat tinged with sarcasm. "Oh, very well. Would you care for me to bring you some adequate reading material, then? Perhaps something by Bram Stoker?" And the dog growled…'

Destiny ceases to read, for that is the past and it is done, and the future and destiny is happening even now. Now the dog is once more a man, or something that looks like a man, and he is no longer in the Dreaming but in the waking world, and he has a new master who has many paths before her, and all of them are dark and some of them are very terrible.

He turns a page, another and another, and then he reads the words that are there. '"Are you so very certain that it was not a dream, little master?"'

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A/N: Cain and Abel, aside from obviously being in Genesis, were also featured in DC comics years before they turned up in The Sandman, though the people who use them are fairly dicey on whether or not they are the actual biblical brothers. Neil Gaiman's version of Cain has something of an obsessive-compulsive disorder which leads him to murder his brother again and again; fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) for Abel, he doesn't stay dead for long and recovers from whatever Cain does to him after a few hours. Amazingly, in some strange way they like each other. This is but one of many

**dysfunctional family units in The Sandman. Try a family of seven rather powerful anthropomorphic personifications whose names all begin with D, one of which is trying to orchestrate the death of another sibling, apparently for kicks. **

**Oh, those wacky Endless.**

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